Unknown language #20
« previous post | next post »
From Rebecca Turner in Seattle:
Rebecca writes:
Attached is a sticker I found on a lamp post outside of a gay bar in my neighborhood, written in an unidentified script or scripts. In the same location some months ago I saw a similar picture with a message written in sitelen pona (one of the toki pona scripts), so I suspect it may be a conlangscript of some sort.
My nerdiest friends have collectively failed to identify the writing system involved. Particularly vexing are the characters that look like thetas and epsilons in the top half of the sticker (the script used in the bottom half looks a bit more angular and may be a different writing system entirely?). Near guesses include Shavian and Quikscript.
Some of my acquaintances, as stumped as I am, pointed towards Language Log as a potential source of clarification. If you are also interested, I'd appreciate a post so we can figure out the script (and ideally the message) used here.
Go to it, Language Loggers!
Selected readings
- "Unknown language #19"
- "Sapir-Whorf redux" (5/15/25) — speaking to the aims of the designers and adherents of sitelen pona and toki pona
- "Linguistic relativity: snow and horses" (4/15/25)
- "Create a language, go to jail" (12/15/11)
- "Yay Newfriend again" (4/22/24)
Gregory Kusnick said,
July 4, 2025 @ 3:21 pm
I have no idea what it is, but there are enough similarities between the upper and lower halves that I'd feel comfortable saying they're the same script written by different hands
Christian Horn said,
July 4, 2025 @ 3:42 pm
No idea what it is, but I wonder somehow if it's rotated by 180degree.
Daphne Preston-Kendal said,
July 4, 2025 @ 4:16 pm
Cherokee, no?
Jacob said,
July 4, 2025 @ 5:58 pm
Some of the characters look like Lojban's Zbalermorna.
It's definitely not (unless it's a variant I guess), but I thought I'd just put that out there.
David Morris said,
July 4, 2025 @ 6:16 pm
Daphne's suggestion of Cherokee deserves further investigation by someone who knows more about it than I do (viz, anything at all). From Wikipedia, the borrowed from roman letters H and J, Ꮎ (the theta-like symbol in the middle of the first full row) and Ꮜ (the bucket-like symbol at the end of the second full row) are all Cherokee characters.
(Describing the characters in case the copy-and-paste Cherokee characters don't render.)
Jay Sekora said,
July 4, 2025 @ 6:48 pm
Jay Kinda looks like Canadian Aboriginal syllabics to me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics). I don't know anything about any of the languages involved, but if it was put there by the same person who put the Toki Pona script, it might be an attempt to render Lojban or Klingon in syllabics anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
F said,
July 4, 2025 @ 11:07 pm
The top half (but not the bottom) looks like the characters are built out of the seven bars |Ξ| of a calculator display, then rounded off for easier handwriting.
sam said,
July 5, 2025 @ 4:57 am
I note that the top half has a seven character preface written larger (a heading?), then it's 4 lines of 16 characters, which looks suspiciously rectangular. I tried transcribing a bit of it as seven-segment symbols following F's idea and then interpreting it as seven-bit ASCII (with both of the two common bit encodings listed in the Wikipedia article), but only got line noise. But it could still be relatively cleartext ASCII and my transcription just isn't great or it's a homebrew bit encoding (or even something more complicated).
If you interpret spaces in the bottom half as a 'character', then that's 3 lines of 11 characters and then a final line of 9 characters. That's also suspiciously rectangular, but 3 x 11 doesn't set off my 'this is digital data' alarm the same way 4 x 16 does.
Victor Mair said,
July 5, 2025 @ 5:08 am
@sam
Brilliant observations!
"suspiciously rectangular" — reminds me of Literary Sinitic (LS) verse
sam said,
July 5, 2025 @ 7:04 am
The theta character actually rules out cleartext ASCII in any encoding that treats segments consistently (so, e.g., ruling out the top bar's presence is a 1 but the middle bar's presence is a 0), since it's either all 1s and so DEL or it's all 0s and so NUL. There's the possibility of error, but it's probably not a sloppy-handwriting not-quite-open-enough-at-the-top barred U, because the top part has two other examples that aren't even close to accidentally being closed; it could be an encoding mistake, but that's an annoying hypothesis I'm going to just ignore.
Roger M. Rutz said,
July 5, 2025 @ 12:31 pm
These are cursive Hebrew letters. I'm not going to take the time to figure out whether it is written in Yiddish or Hebrew, but it could be either.
Noam said,
July 5, 2025 @ 2:11 pm
@Rutz I’m pretty sure those are almost, but not completely, unlike script Hebrew letters. It’s a bit like how I often feel when I see katakana.
Jon W said,
July 5, 2025 @ 3:36 pm
I learned cursive Hebrew letters as a tyke. These are not that.
Patel said,
July 5, 2025 @ 4:11 pm
It appears to be the Ho script from India,used to write Ho, an Austroasiatic language.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warang_Citi